A blade server subsystem is characterized by high computing capability, space saving, centralized management and being easy to extend. Compared with a conventional rack system and a tower server system, the blade server subsystem may help enterprises to reduce the costs of power supply, heat dissipation and storage space, and as a result, a blade server has been used due to advantages with respect to cost efficiency.
The blade server subsystem includes a large number of hot-swappable devices, referred to as blades, accommodated in a chassis. The blade mentioned here is an independent server, and the blade includes one or more processors and related memories, storage disks and network controllers, and runs its own operating system (OS) and application program. The blade server subsystem shares common infrastructure components, such as power sources, fans, Compact Disk Read-Only Memories (CD-ROMs) and floppy disk drives, Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC) switches and system ports, and thereby the complexity of many rack systems is avoided. The most significant difference lies in that the blade server subsystem is installed on a horizontal bottom plate in a perpendicular manner, while a typical rack system is formed by horizontal arrangement of vertically stacked servers.
In the implementation of the present invention, the inventor finds that though the blade server subsystem requires low power consumption, the density of blades is high, and in a high-density deployment environment, the reliability of blades is lower than that of tower and rack servers, and spare blades may not be replaced quickly; and in a distributed system, the reliability of nodes deployed on the blade server is lower than that of nodes deployed on a minicomputer, as a result, a system reliability is low.